World Championship Format Preview: Draft

Hello, I’m Patrick Sullivan, one of the designers on Eternal, and what follows is the first of a multi-part series explaining and celebrating the formats for our upcoming World Championships, February 12-13th. All three of our primary competitive formats–Draft, Expedition, and Throne–will be part of the championship weekend, meaning our competitors need to hone their complete skills to capture the title.

Draft is our only “non-constructed” format in Worlds, meaning players will not be entering the event with a built deck. Rather, they will be selecting cards out of randomized packs, building decks out of those cards, and then playing against opponents who have done the same. The draft format for Worlds, focused on the recent Cold Hunt expansion, is the same as the one in the game right now. This means the draft experience you can have right now is the same as you’ll be watching on the weekend, and that the lessons you learn from watching can be applied to your own draft strategies going forward.

Draft occupies an interesting place in Eternal. In many ways it is our most accessible format–you don’t need a collection to build a competitive deck, and everyone is on equal footing. On top of that, drafting is a great way to build a collection, since you keep the cards you draft along with the prizes you receive. All of this makes draft an excellent place for new or lapsed players to focus their attention. However, the mechanics and strategy can be a bit opaque, especially to players mostly familiar with playing traditional constructed formats. So who better to break down those barriers than one of the designers?

What is Draft?

As mentioned above, draft is a format where players select individual cards out of packs and build a deck out of that selected pool, rather than building a deck ahead of time. At the beginning of a draft, you will open a pack of Cold Hunt, the same one you can buy from the store or receive for your first win of the day, and select one card:

After selecting a card, you’ll receive another pack, but this time with one card missing. You’ll continue this way until you’ve drafted 12 cards from diminishing packs. After the first pack, you’ll open up a Draft Pack. The Draft Pack is a specially curated set of older cards which, along with our most recent sets, make up the pool of Expedition-legal cards.

You’ll then draft 12 more cards in the same fashion as before. Then, another Draft Pack, and finally a second pack of Cold Hunt, leaving you with 48 cards with which to build your deck. The deck minimum is 45 cards and the same “1/3rd power” requirement from constructed applies as well.

That part is easy enough. Of course, nothing above really speaks to “strategy” or even “things to look out for”, but we can start to dive in there.

Strategy for Draft, generally speaking:

Draft is sometimes derided as a random collection of incoherent cards, but nothing could be further from the truth. In general, decks that are cohesive and intentional outperform decks that are just a “bunch of stuff”, and knowing the nuances of what to look out for, what are critical pieces of certain archetypes, and other in-draft information is just as important as playing well in the games themselves.

The majority of draft decks are two factions, and generally play between 16-18 power cards (though Cold Hunt has some exceptions to these rules–more on that below.) Drafting single-faction will typically leave you straining for enough “playables” while receiving packs with little to no options, while three or more factions will often have consistency issues. I have occasionally strayed from these guidelines (three factions is not uncommon), but as a starting point I recommend trying to stick to exactly two factions.

In Eternal, you are being “fed” packs from a previous drafter. This is a bit complicated to explain in depth, but what this means in practice is that you aren’t seeing fully randomized boosters each time, with the exception of the ones you open. That means that reading “signals”, or which factions are and are not available, is critical. If you see a really strong Justice card in the fifth pack, or a collection of good Primal cards towards the end of a pack, there’s a very good chance that the person “in front of you” isn’t drafting those factions, and you can expect that trend to continue in future packs. This isn’t a hard science–sometimes the reason you see a Finest Hour 6th is because there was also a Harsh Rule in that pack, which the previous drafter selected instead–but if you stay attuned to such things you’ll find yourself with a stronger collection of cards over time.

I spoke about “cohesion” before and while there are some cards (particularly unit removal, like Slay) that are powerful and useful no matter what you’re doing, many cards have more or less desirability depending on what your overall strategy is. Your very fast Rakano deck might put a premium on Finest Hour or District Infantry relative to ostensibly stronger cards; your grindy Argenport deck may not want to play either card at all. You’ll often have to make due with less-than-ideal cards, such is the nature of draft, but being mindful about what your deck actually wants to do is important.

Cold Hunt Heuristics and Mechanics, or “ignore most of what I just said”

Of course, every format is going to have specific elements that will cause a savvy drafter to modify or even ignore a lot of these principles. Cold Hunt is more radical than most in this respect.

Inscribe:

Inscribe is a mechanic that appears for the first time in Cold Hunt. Cards with Inscribe can be played as a depleted power of their appropriate faction. This is probably the most significant mechanic in the set in terms of upending a lot of the principles above.

Since cards with Inscribe can be played as a power, you can play a lower power count than you typically would and get the best of both worlds–power when you need it, and action when you don’t. The bare minimum number of actual power cards you need to play is 15–1/3rd of the 45 deck minimum–and many skilled drafters swear by 15 power along with a liberal sampling of Inscribe cards to balance this out.

Inscribe also impacts how tolerant one can be of “splashing”, of exploring three or even greater factions in their deck. If you are splashing a card with Inscribe, the downside risk of not being able to play it is considerably lower–you can just play it as a power instead. As an example, if you played three copies of Carnosaur Beta as your only Time cards with no Time sigils, that’s considerably less risky than playing three Time cards and some Time sigils in your otherwise two-faction deck. This isn’t meant to suggest its “free”–its not like it is desirable to play depleted, off-faction sigils–but it is much less risky than usual.

Contract:

Contract comes with a numerical value and is an optional Summon/cast condition that means “you may pay this much power through this and following turns for the bonus.” If you have enough power to pay it off at the time of playing, it automatically pays, otherwise it becomes “Debt” which then gets paid off automatically at the start of the next turn.

Contract is useful both for spreading out costs and getting big boosts of stuff “up front”, so it plays well in both slower and faster strategies.

.Curfew Patrol is a great example of the flexibility I’m talking about–it functions well as a late game play, and the stats, skills, and Contract ability are especially useful when you’ve fallen behind early in the game.

Hero Matters:

With Cold Hunt came the debut of the “Hero” tag, given to our marquee storyline units. Not only are there numerous heroes in Cold Hunt, heroes from previous sets have been updated with the tag, found at the bottom of the art frame.

There are a handful of cards that are particularly synergistic with heroes throughout Cold Hunt. It is worth keeping an eye out for those cards alongside the hero units, many of which are among the strongest in draft anyway.

.Inseparable is totally reasonable even without any heroes, but spiking the bonus here is incredible.

Invoke:

Invoke is an old mechanic coming back to Cold Hunt in a significant way. Cards that can be worth more than one card are among the strongest in Draft, and because Invoke doesn’t weight for rarity in the cards it displays they can be a way to spike high-rarity cards that can be difficult to pick up in Draft. Invoke is considered to be one of the strongest mechanics in the game in Draft relative to its strength in Constructed, and many of the Invoke cards in Cold Hunt are the strongest way to start your draft. Keep your eyes out for these Uncommons.

.Frostburn is a great example of how strong the Invoke cards can be–sometimes capable of taking out two units “on its own”, speaks to some spell damage synergies scattered throughout Skycrag, with Invoke as the icing on the cake.

Thus concludes our Cold Hunt draft tutorial. This is only scratching the surface of the depth of this format, but if you’re new or returning to the game hopefully this serves as a way to get yourself started. Check out our previews of the Throne and Expedition formats, and don’t forget to watch the Eternal World Championships, on February 12th and 13th!